A good, hooky first line of a novel is found in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Cryroburn, which starts, “Angels were falling all around.” You have to keep reading to slowly discover that the protagonist is having hallucinations from a drug reaction and to sort out his real surroundings from his visions. During that time other questions start to manifest, questions the protagonist needs to answer, and you’re hooked.
The character: For a hook to work the reader has to immediately care about your characters, their problems, and their need to solve them. To do that, the reader has to know who the characters are. I cannot emphasize this enough: you need to let your readers know who your character is right off the bat. It can be a misdirection, but it must be clear, and it must not be done as an “infodump” where you tell the reader. Work it into the writing and the dialog, or internal dialog.
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